The labs listed below are WWW-based engineering/science experiments developed for beginning science and engineering students. The objective of the course and the virtual laboratory is to introduce students to experimentation, problem solving, data gathering, and scientific interpretation early in their careers–perhaps as high school seniors or college freshmen. Ordinarily this exposure would be offered to students in their junior or senior year in a design lab.

The experiments which follow are written in JAVA and are fully interactive. As such, they require that the student access them using the Web browser Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 (or later) operating within a 32-bit operating system (e.g., Windows 95, Windows NT, Unix) and with a display capability of at least 256 colors. (Netscape 3.01 (or later) may also be used with these modules. But, within some operating systems, this browser introduces idiosyncracies in the modules’ operation. Earlier versions of Netscape, including 3.0, will not work.) Further, within these experiments are MPEG movie sequences which may require additional software–an MPEG viewer, e.g., VMPEGWIN which is available as demonstration shareware (sufficient for these experiments). This is a project under development. Expect modifications ( and additions and removals).

Johns Hopkins University: Virtual Laboratory

Wired’s overview of contemporary mad scientists:

Daryl Bem - Precognition
Edward Kelly - Disembodied consciousness (”Remote Viewing”?)
Eric Lerner - Origin of the cosmos
Rollin McCraty - Atmospheric effects on physiology
Garret Moddel - Telekinesis
Peter Sturrock - UFOs

Wired: The Truth Is Out There, and the Nation’s Maddest Scientists Are After It

When you’re on a diet, deciding to skip your favorite calorie-laden foods and eat something healthier takes a whole lot of self-control–an ability that seems to come easier to some of us than others. Now, scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have uncovered differences in the brains of people who are able to exercise self-control versus those who find it almost impossible.

The key? While everyone uses the same single area of the brain to make these sorts of value-laden decisions, a second brain region modulates the activity of the first region in people with good self-control, allowing them to weigh more abstract factors–healthiness, for example–in addition to basic desires such as taste to make a better overall choice.

These findings not only provide insight into the interplay between self-control and decisionmaking in dieters, but may explain how we make any number of decisions that require some degree of willpower. [...]

The next step, the researchers say, is to come up with ways to engage the DLPFC in the decisions made by people with poor self-control under normal conditions. For instance, Hare says, it might be possible to kick the DLPFC into gear by making the health qualities of foods more salient for people, rather than asking them to make the effort to judge a food’s health benefits on their own. “If we highlight the fact that ice cream is unhealthy just before we offer it,” he notes, “maybe we can reduce its value in advance, give the person a head start to making a better decision.”

Science Daily: Mechanisms Of Self-control Pinpointed In Brain

(via OVO)

“Taking a hint from the text comparison methods used to detect plagiarism in books, college papers and computer programs, University of California, Berkeley, researchers have developed an improved method for comparing whole genome sequences. With nearly a thousand genomes partly or fully sequenced, scientists are jumping on comparative genomics as a way to construct evolutionary trees, trace disease susceptibility in populations, and even track down people’s ancestry.

To date, the most common techniques have relied on comparing a limited number of highly conserved genes - no more than a couple dozen - in organisms that have all these genes in common. The new method can be used to compare even distantly related organisms or organisms with genomes of vastly different sizes and diversity, and can compare the entire genome, not just a selected small fraction of the gene-containing portion known to code for proteins, which in the human genome is only 1 percent of the DNA.

The technique produces groupings of organisms largely consistent with current groupings, but with some interesting discrepancies, according to Sung-Hou Kim, professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley and faculty researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. However, the relative positions of the groups in the family tree - that is, how recently these groups evolved - are quite different from those based on conventional gene alignment methods.The computational results have surprised scientists in being able to classify some bacteria and viruses that until now were enigmatic. The technique, which employs feature frequency profiles (FFP), is described in a paper to appear this week in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

(via UC Berkley News. Thanks Josh!)

An article by Gerry Everding from Physorg.com discusses reseach demonstrating that various regions of the brain are activated by reading fiction.

A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to “get lost” in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.

“Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story,” says Jeffrey M. Zacks, study co-author and director of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis.

The study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, is one of a series in which Zacks and colleagues use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track real-time brain activity as study participants read and process individual words and short stories.

Hey, pathworking and other forms of guided imagery actually do something measurable!  Why, that means that role-playing games…umh…uh, oh.

“One of the last remaining problems in science is the riddle of consciousness. The human brain—a mere lump of jelly inside your cranial vault—can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space and grapple with concepts such as zero and infinity. Even more remarkably it can ask disquieting questions about the meaning of its own existence. “Who am I” is arguably the most fundamental of all questions.

It really breaks down into two problems—the problem of qualia and the problem of the self. My colleagues, the late Francis Crick and Christof Koch have done a valuable service in pointing out that consciousness might be an empirical rather than philosophical problem, and have offered some ingenious suggestions. But I would disagree with their position that the qualia problem is simpler and should be addressed first before we tackle the “Self.” I think the very opposite is true. I have every confidence that the problem of self will be solved within the lifetimes of most readers of this essay. But not qualia.”

(via Edge. h/t: Integral Praxis)

“Sir Terry Pratchett has been trialling a revolutionary new device that claims to slow, and even reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s. The award-winning author, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2007, is one of the first patients in the UK to try the anti-dementia helmet. The device sends intense bursts of light at a particular wavelength the a patient’s skull.

The helmet’s designer, Dr Gordon Dougal is convinced the device could transform the lives of thousands of people with Alzheimer’s, which currently affects 700,000 people in the UK. The Discworld author, who has donated over £500,000 to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, first contacted Dr Dougal about his invention last year. The County Durham-based GP said: ‘When Sir Terry’s people contacted me I was very happy to help. We made another prototype helmet and he has had that since last August.’

A custom-built helmet was made from a cast of Mr Pratchett’s head. It was then attached to the back of an armchair at the writer’s home in order that he could use it for the recommended six minutes each day. Mr Pratchett’s progress was assessed by a computer, which showed a small, but measurable, improvement in his condition after three months. More importantly, said Dr Dougal, the computer could find no signs of further deterioration during this period.”

(via The Daily Mail)

I have three emotional principles in all my work. One is wonder, another is sympathy, and the third is critique. These are virtues of different disciplines that are generally not combined. Wonder we think of as a traditional scientific discipline or motive. It’s great to wonder at the grandeur and glory of the universe, the childlike wonder, the Stephen Jay Gould wonder, the Einsteinian wonder.

But there’s also the traditional historical virtue of sympathy, which is to realize that the world we live in really is kind of a moment in time when we have the entire history of the universe behind us that we can explore as well. And when it comes to human interpretation, it’s important to see the past the way the people saw it. So I’ve written two books on Nazi medicine, and the goal there was not just to condemn them, but to see how in the world they came up with those ideas and those movements and how they justified them to themselves. So we see them as full humans and not just scarecrows, so we can actually understand the depth of the depravity or whatever. But at least we see it honestly, and that’s a traditional historical virtue.

The third principle is critique, which is to realize that we’re humans first. If we’re cosmologists or historians, we’re at least humans first and then cosmologists and historians. We need to critique and show that there’s a lot of garbage out there, and we don’t want to be apologists for some horrific status quo where people are dying by the millions. And so we don’t just want to see things through other people’s eyes and we don’t want to just wonder at the glory of nature. We want to realize that there’s horrific suffering in the world and that we, as humans and as scholars, have a duty to do something about it.

Full Story: Discover Magazine

(via OVO)

“Pelicans suffering from a mysterious malady are crashing into cars and boats, wandering along roadways and turning up dead by the hundreds across the West Coast, from southern Oregon to Baja California, Mexico, bird-rescue workers say. Weak, disoriented birds are huddling in people’s yards or being struck by cars. More than 100 have been rescued along the California coast, according to the International Bird Rescue Research Center in San Pedro.

Hundreds of birds, disoriented or dead, have been observed across the West Coast. “One pelican actually hit a car in Los Angeles,” said Rebecca Dmytryk of Wildrescue, a bird-rescue operation. “One pelican hit a boat in Monterey. While some of the symptoms resemble those associated with domoic-acid poisoning — an ocean toxin that sometimes affects sea birds and mammals — other symptoms do not. Domoic acid also apparently has not been found in significant amounts offshore, although more tests are needed.

Rescuers are wondering whether the illness is caused by a virus, or even by contaminants washed into the ocean after recent fires across Southern California. Many of the birds also have swollen feet.”

(via The Seattle Times)

“In an important breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language, researchers in Great Britain and the United States have imaged the first high definition imprints that dolphin sounds make in water. The key to this technique is the CymaScope, a new instrument that reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially. Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer, John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to image, for the first time, the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water. The resulting “CymaGlyphs,” as they have been named, are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin ‘picture word.’

Certain sounds made by dolphins have long been suspected to represent language but the complexity of the sounds has made their analysis difficult. Previous techniques, using the spectrograph, display cetacean (dolphins, whales and porpoises) sounds only as graphs of frequency and amplitude. The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin’s natural environment-water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time.

Within the field of cetacean research, theory states that dolphins have evolved the ability to translate dimensional information from their echolocation sonic beam. The CymaScope has the ability to visualize dimensional structure within sound. CymaGlyph patterns may resemble what the creatures perceive from their own returning sound beams and from the sound beams of other dolphins. Reid said that the technique has similarities to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. “Jean-Francois Champollion and Thomas Young used the Rosetta Stone to discover key elements of the primer that allowed the Egyptian language to be deciphered. The CymaGlyphs produced on the CymaScope can be likened to the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone. Now that dolphin chirps, click-trains and whistles can be converted into CymaGlyphs, we have an important tool for deciphering their meaning.”

(via Red Orbit)

(CymaScope’s site)

“The snowflakes’ pictures are captured by Kenneth G. Libbrecht using a specially designed snowflake photomicroscope. Kenneth Libbrecht is a professor of physics at Caltech. His recent research has focused on the properties of ice crystals, particularly the structure of snowflakes.”

(via Zuza Fun)

(SnowCrystals.com)

Stewart Brand, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Douglas Rushkoff, Garret Lisi and about a bazillion more weigh in on this year’s Edge question:

New tools equal new perceptions.

Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.

Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.

And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.

Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the DNA double helix, and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, recently were awarded Double Helix Awards from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for being the founding fathers of human genome sequencing. They are the first two human beings to have their complete genetic information decoded.

Watson noted during his acceptance speech that he doesn’t want government involved in decisions concerning how people choose to handle information about their personal genomes.

Venter is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. He has already announced transplanting the information from one genome into another. In other words, your dog becomes your cat. He has privately alluded to important scientific progress in his lab, the result of which, if and when realized, will change everything.
WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?
“What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

Full Story: Edge

Very nice to start the year with advice from Taleb

A Canadian college student majoring in chemistry built himself a home lab - and discovered that trying to do science in your own home quickly leads to accusations of drug-making and terrorism.

Lewis Casey, an 18-year-old in Saskatchewan, had built a small chemistry lab in his family’s garage near the university where he studies. Then two weeks ago, police arrived at his home with a search warrant and based on a quick survey of his lab determined that it was a meth lab. They pulled Casey out of the shower to interrogate him, and then arrested him.

A few days later, police admitted that Casey’s chemistry lab wasn’t a meth lab - but they kept him in jail, claiming that he had some of the materials necessary to produce explosives. Friends and neighbors wrote dozens of letters to the court, testifying that Casey was innocent and merely a student who is really enthusiastic about chemistry.

Full Story: io9

(Thanks Justin!)

“The inventor of a car slightly wider than a strand of DNA took the top prize in nanotechnologies this week. James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University, won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology for his nanocar, which is four nanometers across and includes a chassis with an engine, a pivoting suspension and rotating axles attached to rolling buckyball wheels, each made of 60 carbon atoms.

Tour and his team of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers not only built a car, but also constructed a nanotruck capable of carrying a payload. Asked why he did it, Tour’s answer was simple: so that we can someday construct buildings and other large objects with molecular-size vehicles.

It took Tour and his team eight years to build the car. One of the significant challenges was attaching the wheels because the buckyballs had the adverse affect of shutting down the binding property — the palladium reaction — used to form the rest of the vehicle. Over the next 30 years, Tour’s nanotechnology could produce quantum-dot memory, which involves stringing together metal atoms in patterns that could then store data. Each quantum dot would consist of 50 metal atoms, he said. Of course, that’s a long way off, Tour acknowledged. He hasn’t even patented the technology because by the time it could be used to make money, the patents would be expired. And we’re not talking about a few nanotrucks carrying metal atoms to construct skyscrapers but 10²³ or more vehicles, all carrying nanoparticles in orchestration, he said.”

(via ComputerWorld via Sue Lange’s blog “Singularity Watch”)

“It may not sound like the most promising start to a romance, but a bout of sneezing can be sign that someone is attracted to you. Doctors have uncovered a bizarre medical condition where people sneeze every time they think about sex or have an orgasm. The condition appears to afflict both and men and women and to be uncontrollable.

Dr Mahmood Bhutta, an ear, nose and throat expert at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, who describes the condition in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, admits that his initial reaction was disbelief. But now he thinks the phenomenon is genuine and closely linked to the bursts of sneezing that one in four people have when they are exposed to bright sunshine.

The condition came to light in a middle-aged man, who has not been named, who complained that he had an uncontrollable fit of sneezes each time he was sexually aroused. After overcoming his scepticism, Dr Bhutta began searching medical records - and internet chat rooms - to see if anyone else had a similar problem. ‘I was surprised by how many people also reported the same reflex in internet chat rooms,’ he said. Typing the words ’sex, sneeze or sneezing’ into the Google search engine produced a surprising number of hits. Seventeen men and women reported sneezing immediately when they thought about sex, and three had the same experience after orgasm.”

(via The Daily Mail)

What’s the solution to America’s crisis in science education? More comic books. In December comes The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA, a remarkably thorough explanation of the science of genetics, from Mendel to Venter, with a strand of social urgency spliced in. “If there was ever a time that we needed a push to make science a priority, it’s now,” says Howard Zimmerman, the book’s editor and, not coincidentally, a former elementary-school science teacher. “Advances in treatments for disease cannot take place in a society that shuns science.” Zimmerman works with the New York literary publishing house Hill and Wang, which discovered Elie Weisel and has been creating a new niche for itself as one of the premiere producers of major graphic “nonfiction novels” like the war on terror primer After 9/11 and the bio-comic Ronald Reagan.

Stuff of Life is the first in a series dedicated to the hard sciences. The author is Mark Schultz, a DC Comics veteran and creator of the postapocalyptic classic Xenozoic Tales. The 160-page work, illustrated by Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon (improbably, no genetic relation), covers the regenerative processes of DNA, human migratory patterns, cloned apples, and stem cells. In a rapidly changing field, it’s as up-to-date and accurate as possible.

How Comics Can Save Us From Scientific Ignorance - Wired

What’s the solution to America’s crisis in science education? More comic books. In December comes The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA, a remarkably thorough explanation of the science of genetics, from Mendel to Venter, with a strand of social urgency spliced in. “If there was ever a time that we needed a push to make science a priority, it’s now,” says Howard Zimmerman, the book’s editor and, not coincidentally, a former elementary-school science teacher. “Advances in treatments for disease cannot take place in a society that shuns science.” Zimmerman works with the New York literary publishing house Hill and Wang, which discovered Elie Weisel and has been creating a new niche for itself as one of the premiere producers of major graphic “nonfiction novels” like the war on terror primer After 9/11 and the bio-comic Ronald Reagan.

Stuff of Life is the first in a series dedicated to the hard sciences. The author is Mark Schultz, a DC Comics veteran and creator of the postapocalyptic classic Xenozoic Tales. The 160-page work, illustrated by Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon (improbably, no genetic relation), covers the regenerative processes of DNA, human migratory patterns, cloned apples, and stem cells. In a rapidly changing field, it’s as up-to-date and accurate as possible.

How Comics Can Save Us From Scientific Ignorance - Wired

“An ancient grave unearthed in modern-day Israel containing 50 tortoise shells, a human foot and body parts from numerous animals is likely one of the earliest known shaman burial sites, researchers said on Monday. The 12,000-year-old grave dates back to the Natufian people who were the first society to adopt a sedentary lifestyle, Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher Leore Grosman and colleagues said.

“The interment rituals and the method used to construct and seal the grave suggest this is the burial of an ancient shaman, one of the earliest known from the archaeological record,” they wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Shamans play an important role in many cultures, mediating between the human and spiritual worlds and acting as messengers, healers, magicians to serve the community, the researchers said.

The Israeli team found the bones in a small cave in the lower Galilee region of present-day Israel that was a Natufian burial ground for a least 28 people. At the time of burial, more than 10 large stones were placed directly on the head, pelvis, and arms of the elderly woman whose body was laid on its side. The legs were spread apart and folded inward at the knee. The special treatment of the body and use of stones to keep it in a certain position suggests the woman held a unique position in the community, likely some sort of a shaman, the researchers said.”

(via News Daily. Thanks DJ!)

“It was a blood-curdling discovery. The mummy of a young man with his hands and feed bound, his face contorted in an eternal scream of pain. But who was he and how did he die? On a scorching hot day at the end of June 1886, Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, was unwrapping the mummies of the 40 kings and queens found a few years earlier in an astonishing hidden cache near the Valley of the Kings.

The 1881 discovery of the tombs, in the Deir El Bahri valley, 300 miles south of Cairo, had been astonishing and plentiful. Hidden from the world for centuries were some of the great Egyptian pharaohs - Rameses the Great, Seti I and Tuthmosis III. Yet this body, buried alongside them, was different, entombed inside a plain, undecorated coffin that offered no clues to the deceased’s identity.
It was an unexpected puzzle and, once the coffin was opened, Maspero found himself even more shocked.”

(via The Daily Mail)

“It has long been suspected that humans have an ancient history of drug use, but there has been a lack of proof to support the theory. Now, however, researchers have found equipment used to prepare hallucinogenic drugs for sniffing, and dated them back to prehistoric South American tribes. Quetta Kaye, of University College London, and Scott Fitzpatrick, an archeologist from North Carolina State University, made the breakthrough on the Caribbean island of Carriacou.

They found ceramic bowls, as well as tubes for inhaling drug fumes or powders, which appear to have originated in South America between 100BC and 400BC and were then carried 400 miles to the islands. While the use of such paraphernalia for inhaling drugs is well-known, the age of the bowls has thrown new light on how long humans have been taking drugs. Scientists believe that the drug being used was cohoba, a hallucinogen made from the beans of a mimosa species. Drugs such as cannabis were not found in the Caribbean then. Opiates can be obtained from species such as poppies, while fungi, which was widespread, may also have been used.”

(via Telegraph)

“Controlling the level of a fatty acid in the brain could help treat Alzheimer’s disease, an American study has suggested. Tests on mice showed that reducing excess levels of the acid lessened animals’ memory problems and behavioural changes. Writing in Nature Neuroscience, the team said fatty acid levels could be controlled through diet or drugs. A UK Alzheimer’s expert called the work “robust and exciting”. There are currently 700,000 people living with dementia in the UK, but that number is forecast to double within a generation.

Scientists from Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease and the University of California looked at fatty acids in the brains of normal mice and compared them with those in mice genetically engineered to have an Alzheimer’s-like condition. They identified raised levels of a fatty acid called arachidonic acid in the brains of the Alzheimer’s mice. Its release is controlled by the PLA2 enzyme. The scientists again used genetic engineering to lower PLA2 levels in the animals, and found that even a partial reduction halted memory deterioration and other impairments.”

(via BBC News)

Funny thing about DNA science: when huge breakthroughs get proclaimed, they generally only lead to more questions and collapse into hype upon any serious scrutiny.  Likewise, when baffling new mysteries are announced, they tend to point the way towards a fuller understanding of the DNA cipher. Case in point — this weekend’s headline, Mysterious DNA Found to Survive Eons of Evolution.

The precise term is “ultraconserved sequences,” and as one observer on the RI forum eloquently summarized it, “this mutation-free DNA has shared eveolutionary benefits through out the entire class Mammilia without producing a visible or identifiable shared characteristic.” More meat from the article itself:

…about 500 regions of our DNA have apparently remained intact throughout the history of mammalian evolution, or the past 80 million to 100 million years, basically free of mutations. The researchers call these mystery snippets “ultraconserved regions,” and found that they are about 300 times less likely than other regions of the genome to be lost during the course of mammalian evolution.  “These regions seem to be under intense purifying selection - almost no mutations take hold permanently,” said researcher Gill Bejerano.

Technoccult readers might also be interested in the lucid heresy of Dr. Andras J. Pellionisz, author of the Fractogene website. This new discovery connects quite perfectly with the Pellionisz theory that genes aren’t a sequential list of instructions but rather a fractal and iterative template for organic growth. I would also highly recommend the work of Chris King, who’s been making the same assertion about the fabric of the entire universe.  He recently published a dense but readable 7 page summary of his work, Why the Universe is Fractal, that’s worth printing out and chewing over.

“Over the centuries, many in the British Isles have appealed to witches in times of need–to cure a toothache, concoct a love potion, or curse a neighbor. Witchcraft, the rituals of a number of pagan belief systems, was thought to offer control of the world through rites and incantations. Common as it has been over the past several centuries, the practice is secretive and there are few written records. It tends to be passed down through families and never revealed to outsiders. But archaeologist Jacqui Wood has unearthed evidence of more than 40 witchy rituals beneath her own front yard, bringing to light an unknown branch of witchcraft possibly still practiced today.

Wood’s home is in the hamlet of Saveock Water in Cornwall, a county tucked in the far southwest corner of the country. For thousands of years people have raised crops and livestock in its fertile valleys, and its coastline of dramatic cliffs, secluded coves, and pounding surf was once a haunt for smugglers. Cornwall is a place time forgot; steeped in folklore, myth, and legend; and purported to be inhabited by pixies, fairies, and elves. So it should come as no surprise that it has also been home to the dark arts.

When I visit Saveock Water it is raining, which adds to its unearthly atmosphere. Wood, a warm lady with sparkling hazel eyes, greets me in her cozy white-washed barn while rain hammers on the roof. She moved to Saveock Water 15 years ago because it was an ideal location for her work in experimental archaeology, replicating ancient techniques, including those used in farming or metallurgy. Since then she has carried out her experiments, such as growing ancient crop varieties, unaware of what lay under her fields. In the late 1990s, Wood decided to do some metalwork research by re-creating an ancient kind of furnace. “I dug down into the ground to construct a shelter close to the furnace and I discovered a clay floor,” she says.”

(via Archaeology)

So far I’ve been blown away by pretty much every single bit of content on AfriGadget. It’s a guided tour of low-tech (and no-tech) solutions to basic life necessities in a total poverty environment.  It’s a serious education, from converting dumpsites into farms, to greywater recycling gardens, electronics projects like DIY stage lights and fundamental skills like handmaking tools when you’re 20,000 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart. There’s even coverage of digital media entrepreneurs in Bamako, Mali (which is home to some of the world’s greatest musicians, by the way). I was also keenly interested in the DIY car security system…using a mobile phone.

It’s an amazing window into another way of life full of vibrant photography, but knowing how to build an evaporation-powered cooler is a skill that transcends the pretty pictures, right?  I know that Technoccult reaches a global audience of empowered future mutants, so if anyone in or near the Mother Continent wants to get involved, here’s how to get started.

“He was known as the king of the Yosemite lifers, that proud band of rock climbers, tightrope walkers and seekers who made camp on the margins of the law, sleeping under the black oaks and sequoias and California stars. On his shoulders he carried an 80-pound constellation of canvas stowage, books and sweatpants, bottled water and mushy food, a sleeping bag and a reserve sleeping bag meant for some encountered companion of the road. To the government, he was Charles Victor Tucker III, scourge of Yosemite National Park, fixture of the lodge cafeteria. To acquaintances, he was Chuck, harmless and stoned jester of the mountains. And to climbers the world over he remains Chongo, the Monkey Man, named for the sticky soles he had once fashioned from Mexican rubber. ‘I learned a lot from Chongo,’ said Ivo Ninov, 32, an accomplished guide from Bulgaria, ‘because he was the father of big wall climbing.’

But the fullness of Chongo’s legacy would appear only through his disappearance from rock climbing, a passage from sylvan to urban wilds that has made him a stranger to his sport and an outcast from his home, now reduced to sleeping under a tractor-trailer. Along the way, he would find a new kind of homelessness, and a new sense of mission. Even among outliers, Chongo, 57, had always diverged. In a time of corporate sponsorships, he lived on charity, scavenging and bartering handmade wares. In a time of brand-name gear, he rigged worthy contraptions from found parts. In a time of speed-climbing records, he gained renown for his comically deliberate ascents. Once, he stretched an assault on El Capitan across two weeks, including three days spent pausing to consider some half-forgotten existential puzzle.

Dumb jokes congealed around his legend, for he projected a familiar and comforting sort of weirdness. Around a campfire or a cafeteria table, tourists and weekend warriors could find in Chongo a certain box to cross off, the obligatory aging hippie recounting unintentionally hilarious misadventures, denouncing the prison-industrial complex and rhapsodizing on junk science.”

(via The New York Times)

(Homeless Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics)